Heaven Adores You, Nickolas Rossi’s documentary about the personal and creative trajectory of the much-beloved singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, will get a brief global theatrical run in May. A fixture on the international festival circuit throughout last fall, the doc will play a series of mostly one-night screenings primarily in the US and UK May 7-14 via specialty distributor SpectiCast.

The film features interviews with many of Smith’s closest friends and collaborators and loads of previously unheard music, including early demos of songs that would later appear, sometimes in very different form, on his albums. As he told NME, Kevin Moyer, a schoolmate of Smith’s who worked on the doc, was given full access to the vaults at his late friend’s labels, Kill Rock Stars and Universal. Rossi weaves the musical finds into a narrative drawn in large part from interviews with Smith and a visual palette of vistas of the cities where he lived and work – Portland, LA, and New York – to lend the film a meditative, present-tense quality, an approach the director discussed in greater detail in a November MFW interview.